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Rich Text Editors in the TYPO3 backend

Introduction

When you configure a table in $TCA and add a field of the type "text" which is edited by a <textarea>, you can choose to use a Rich Text Editor (RTE) instead of the simple form field. A RTE enables the users to use visual formatting aids to create bold, italic, paragraphs, tables, etc.

A RTE in the TYPO3 BE

The rtehtmlarea RTE activated in the TYPO3 backend

For full details about setting up a field to use a RTE, please refer to the Special Configuration options chapter in the TCA Reference.

The short story is that it's enough to add the key defaultExtras to the configuration of the column with the string richtext[] as value:

'poem' => array(
    'exclude' => 0,
        'label' => 'LLL:EXT:examples/locallang_db.xml:tx_examples_haiku.poem',
        'config' => array(
                'type' => 'text',
                'cols' => 40,
                'rows' => 6
        ),
        'defaultExtras' => 'richtext[]'
),

This works for FlexForms too.

Note

Don't forget to enable Rich Text Editor in the back end, in User Settings -> Edit and Advanced functions, check "Enable Rich Text Editor", if not already done.